Property and Value

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

Montrealer Hugh Hood is typically Canadian—an idealist and a romantic,
blessed with both a serious cast of mind and a great sense of humor.
That the seriousness sometimes gets the better of the wit may help
account for our image abroad. For the most part, however, anyone with a
taste for subtlety and an interest in art and human nature will be
vastly intrigued by Property and Value.

The novel is the eighth in Hood’s ambitious “New Age” series,
which began in 1975 with The Swing in the Garden and is intended to run
to twelve volumes on a Proustian model. Based on the lives of the
Goderich family of Toronto, the series is an epic saga with the nation
itself in a starring role. With its multiple puns on the economic,
philosophic, and spiritual meanings in its title’s terms, the novel is
shaped around the Venice Biennale of 1980 and the making of a film about
Proust set in that magical city. (Of course Canada’s superb exhibition
at the Biennale takes the town by storm.)

Freelance art historian and curator Matt Goderich is hired to direct
the exhibition, while British actress Linnet Olcott stars in the film.
Linnet and Matt’s brother Tony had been lovers in the 1960s but have
not seen each other for 10 years. Tony’s current lover is Matt’s
wife, who has been separated from Matt for seven years. Matt’s
handsome son Anthony is a protegé of Linnet. There’s a hint of
Harlequin in all this: “They were three men and two women joined in a
relation of dreadful subtlety.”

Why Venice? Hood has set fiction there before. The clue to its
attraction lies in its resemblance to Toronto, his home town. As Matt
likes to say, Toronto and Venice form a natural pair, both being
“entrepreneurs’ towns, full of thrusting, greedy, scheming,
ambitious people.”

Parody helps keep some of the heavier passages afloat. The Canadian
temperament and personality and its international image spark some fine
satirical passages. Hood has an insider’s knowledge of an amazing
variety of artistic areas, and the ethnical convictions of a man of
faith. Best of all is his eye for the human comedy, the eternal stuff of
fiction. Property and Value is a fine, life-affirming novel, one of
Hood’s best.